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Quotes

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

—Frederick Douglass, 1855

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

—Herodotus, c. 425 BC

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908